Students, faculty, staff attend campus forum April 25
By: Kavahn Mansouri
Editor-in-Chief
On Wednesday, April 25 in SC 200, STLCC-Meramec President George Wasson addressed the students, faculty and staff to answer questions about the safety of the campus following the arrest of three students involved in an altercation two weeks prior.
This year, there have been a number of incidents on campus. One included the suspension of another student in October after being involved in a dispute. Wasson said the incidents were not related.
The fight involved five individuals, three of which were arrested while all five were suspended. An infant was also involved in the incident. The incident, which was recorded on film and distributed online, caught national attention.
Wasson said there has not been a rise in incidents in the past year and the April incident was the exception.
“The other incident which occurred was a different group – These were not the same people. The other group has been disbanded and there were suspensions from that,” Wasson said. “If you look at that data you’ll see that, no, this is not been an acceleration.”
The college hopes to not see this sort of problem on campus again and is working to make sure the campus is a safe place to learn, according to Wasson.
“We don’t want this to be anything that ever occurs again, we want to be proactive in this, we want to prevent this. We want to make sure that this campus is a place that you can come, a place of refuge, a place of higher learning and that people should feel safe,” Wasson said. “That’s our purpose, that’s my purpose, that is why we’re here.”
Wasson said the campus plans to broaden security camera coverage throughout campus.
“One of the things that’s been put under consideration right now is looking to expand our security cameras, most of our security cameras look to the parking lots and into ingress, egress of the campus. We’re looking at interior security cameras for these things so we can identify and see these things happen,” Wasson said.
Wasson said the police officer presence has been increased and plain-clothes officers are being used. “We don’t want to become a police state,” Wasson said.
Meramec Vice President of Student Affairs Linden Crawford said reports from students are taken seriously and always acted on.
“We have responded by getting reports from people,” Crawford said. “We don’t just read those and laugh, we obviously develop and create some strategies to make sure that that doesn’t happen.”
Wasson said that although safety is of the utmost importance for the campus, he does not want Meramec to lock down.
“We’re not going to gate off Meramec,” Wasson said.” I don’t want to see Meramec as a gated community; I don’t want to see us going through metal detectors and getting patted down.”
